


The light we grew up with

by sdwolfpup



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Disabled Character, Epistolary, F/M, It's vague on purpose, Just Roll With It, a hint of twincest, a little at least, extremely soft, regency-ish?, summertime, very good question, what era does this take place in?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27761278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdwolfpup/pseuds/sdwolfpup
Summary: When Brienne was not yet ten and Jaime was thirteen, his father sent him to stay at Evenfall Hall for the summer.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 93
Kudos: 313





	The light we grew up with

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr, scoundrels-in-love asked for a song for this Song Fic Meme I came up with, and Magic Man's "Waves" was what shuffle randomly provided. I was only supposed to write a few sentences in response. I failed. Initial lyrics from that song, and the inspiration for the fic. Unbeta'd.

_I feel the summer, the light we grew up with  
We’ll forget the past, dear, and learn to live for this_

Summer days lingered longer on Tarth. Brienne didn’t know that for a fact; she wasn’t a maester. But she’d spent a summer in the north, and in King’s Landing, and even in Dorne, and none of them had summers like Tarth. Dorne was one unending summer, but even in the heat in the middle of the year there, she had never stayed on the beach late into the night when the sky turned dark and the ocean wind turned cold. She hadn’t lost hours in the afternoon there, lying under trees in the dappled light and watching puffy clouds float by.

But she hadn’t spent any of those other summers with Jaime, either. 

When Brienne was not yet ten and Jaime was thirteen, his father sent him to stay at Evenfall Hall for the summer. 

“This isn’t the middles ages,” Jaime protested a week into it. “I don’t need to be fostered.” 

But he did, because Jaime was prone to recklessness, especially recklessness with his sister. Fall through spring, Jaime was away at boarding school. In the summers prior he had been allowed home, but there were rumors that he and Cersei had been caught “experimenting” and their father had immediately separated them. When Jaime arrived on Tarth that first year he’d been sullen and angry, so sharply tongued that Brienne spent most of the summer hiding from him out in the meadows and forests of Tarth. She was relieved when he left to his boarding school. 

She’d been annoyed when he’d come back the following summer. No more annoyed than he’d been, at least, and this time she’d been more prepared to defend her precious summer days. She still spent plenty of time away from home, but she didn’t cede her ground to him as often, or as readily. Jaime was no less sharp, but Brienne was better armored. This time when he left, she was there to watch him go. 

The next year, he arrived more beautiful than ever, and this time his snarl had softened some, too. “Wench!” he called her, and she shoved him in the dirt, as strong as him at eleven as he was at fifteen. 

That summer, he joined her in her outings. Brienne had been reluctant to let him, to see this golden lion lying careless in the green grass, weaving crowns from the meadow flowers. 

“Why do you follow me?” she asked midway through the summer, when she’d tried to escape without him and he’d found her anyway. 

“Because everyone else on this island is dull. They all talk about fishing and marble and when the weather’s going to change. The weather never changes in the summer here, and that’s dull, too. You’re the only one who takes advantage of it. Why do you leave every day?” 

“I’m trying to escape you,” she told him, and he laughed and laughed. 

Jaime laughed a lot that summer. It came easily to his pink lips, burst forth from his chest in rolling waves. Brienne hadn’t heard him laugh this much the last two years, but then she’d been far more successful at avoiding him then, too. 

“See you next summer, wench!” he called as he stepped back onto the ferry that would take him to Storm’s End, and from there to a private car that would take him to school. 

The summer Brienne was twelve, she realized Jaime was handsome. Oh she’d known, vaguely, before that. But she understood it that year when he sauntered off of the boat and smirked at her. She saw it in the hungry gazes of women of all ages, as they took in all his youthful beauty, the way he was filling out the long body that the gods had granted him. That summer, Brienne did not sleep or eat well, though she was filled with an electric sort of energy, a knot in her stomach that was tying and untying itself constantly, especially when Jaime was around. When he left at the start of the school year, she slept for almost a full day, devoured a buffet’s worth of food, and felt her father watching her with curious eyes. 

When Brienne was thirteen and Jaime stepped off the boat, she felt the same fluttering in her stomach, but she knew it for what it was this time. Before he’d come, she’d promised herself she would give him space this year, that she would keep to her room. Her resolve immediately melted under the bright sunlight of his smile when he saw her and shouted, “My wench!” 

"I’m not your wench,” she said and he laughed that summertime laugh and hugged her. 

Brienne blamed everything that happened after on that single moment. 

That summer, Brienne followed _him_ around. He treated her kindly - as kindly as Jaime every treated anyone, at least. He bought her treats down at the docks, he made her endless flower crowns and placed them reverently on her head. He paid close attention when she showed off the fencing skills she’d learned during the year. He teased her and annoyed her and laughed and laughed and laughed and when he left that year he hugged her tightly and whispered into her ear, “I won’t be back next summer.” And then he’d gone and, as promised, he had not returned. 

He’d been seventeen that last summer, heading to his final year of school. By the time the following summer arrived he was an adult, done with school and free to go where he wished. Where he wished to go, it turned out, was anywhere but Tarth. He sent Brienne a postcard from Dorne the summer she was fourteen. The message was short: _My wench, Dorne is hot and there are no meadows to speak of. But the beaches are endless. You’d never leave the water. Jaime._

Brienne affixed it to the wall in her room and stared at his handwriting, slanted and sharp as his smiles.  
Jaime sent another postcard the next year, the summer she was fifteen. This one from Braavos. _My wench, It stinks here in the summer. I didn’t think I’d miss Tarth’s obnoxiously fresh air so much. You’d hate it here. I do. Jaime. PS - Write me back._

He’d scrawled an address in Braavos at a military base, and Brienne’s heart seized in her chest. She spent weeks staring at the postcard lined up neatly next to the first, wondering what to tell him. 

“Did you know Jaime joined the army?” she asked her father over dinner one night. 

He looked at her sadly. “Tywin told me. Foolish boy. He’s been sent overseas to fight.” 

Brienne tried to picture Jaime, nineteen and shining, holding a weapon and facing down death. He’d be brave, she thought. But she couldn’t imagine him laughing. 

She wrote him back that night, a dull recollection of her uneventful summer. As the long days dwindled, she received a second postcard. 

_My wench, You’ve made me miss boredom. Remarkable. Jaime. PS - I’m being shipped somewhere new. I’ll send you my address as soon as I have it._

And with that, they became penpals, such as it was. It was always postcards from Jaime, always brief messages that told her little except that his golden light was waning. When she was sixteen, he was unhappy in Myr. When she was seventeen and spending her own fostered summer in Dorne, making friends and learning about the world, he was angry in Pentos. When she was eighteen - her own last summer on Tarth before she left for King’s Landing Girls' College that fall - he was miserable in Qarth. 

_My wench, Fuck all of this. I try to remember the green meadows of Tarth, but I can’t. What color were the flowers there? Purple, I think. I can remember nothing of color here in all this gray. Well. I remember blue. Most days it’s the only good thing I can remember. Jaime._

She sent him her new address when she replied, and then she left Tarth, too. 

The summer she was nineteen, there was no postcard from Jaime at all. She sent him three letters, the last of which was returned, unopened, the recipient identified as unknown. Brienne stared at it until she could put one foot in front of the other, and she’d hurried to the bathroom to hunch, retching, over the toilet. 

She sent a condolence letter to Casterly Rock, extending her sympathies on the loss of their beloved son, her golden, laughing friend. Two weeks later, as she struggled to concentrate on her studies, a postcard arrived, written in shaky, nearly unreadable scrawl. 

_My wench, I regret to inform you that I have not yet died. Your letter was very kind, though. I could feel your pathos. Perhaps you will still have some left for me if I tell you I am now one hand short. Jaime._

Brienne nearly left for Casterly Rock that night to murder him herself. 

Her return correspondence was brief, and furious - _Jaime, You could have told me. It was cruel to leave me to think otherwise. Brienne. PS - I am glad you’re alive._

This time his own response was swift. _Brienne, You’re right. Please forgive me. It’s impossible to write for long with my left hand, but I’ll grovel endlessly if I must. Jaime._

She considered asking it of him, but she was far too relieved to know he still walked the earth to hold it against him. And he had been injured, badly by the sound of it, in a place where he’d always seemed lonely and depressed. At least he was recovering with his family. She wondered if Cersei were still there, too. Caring for the fortunes of any Lannisters except Jaime had never crossed Brienne’s mind before. She was as selfish as him, she supposed. 

The spring Brienne was twenty, Jaime asked if she would be home on Tarth for the summer, suggested perhaps he’d join her there. _I can’t make flower crowns anymore_ , he wrote, _and swimming in more than a placid lake may be far too much. But I can still annoy you as well as ever._

_I’m sorry_ , she’d written back. _I am heading to Winterfell for the summer with my roommate. I already promised. Perhaps next year._

His next letter arrived that fall, the same day she did back at school, a brief missive that mentioned nothing of summer. 

_Brienne_ \- this use of her name felt oddly formal, even though the last one had felt astoundingly intimate - _My sister is getting married this fall. My father has informed me I must bring someone. I’ll pay for your travel if you’ll save me from having to sit with Lysa Arryn all day. Jaime._

_Jaime, I will come, as long as you do not introduce me to everyone as ‘wench.’ Brienne._

_My wench, I make no promises. Jaime._

She had intended to go, was preparing to go to a dress shop with Sansa when the news about her father arrived, and suddenly Brienne had nowhere to go but her empty home. 

It was the grief and the responsibility that pushed every other thought from her mind. She did not think of the wedding until it was far too late, but she wrote Jaime a hasty letter anyway. 

_Jaime. I am sorry to have missed the wedding with no notice. My father unexpectedly passed and I have been swamped with duties. I hope you did not have to suffer too greatly. Brienne._

She sent it expecting no answer in return; Jaime had never been one to forgive a slight, even an accidental one. When his response came, she opened it carefully, reading it from the side as though that would make any bitter words hurt less. 

_Brienne, My sincere condolences. If you need anything_ – this word he had underlined three times for emphasis – _don't hesitate to ask it of me. I have nothing to do now that my sister is gone with her husband, my brother away at college. You've never been to Casterly, but it is a huge and lonesome place, especially when the halls are walked only by an old man and a cripple. Jaime. PS – Your letter arrived just in time; I had to wrestle the courier to the ground to retrieve my first version._

It was the first time she had smiled since the news of her father. 

Jaime must have been bored, because he began writing to her every week after that, all through the winter and well into spring. Brienne answered most of them, though she was busy with running her father's affairs, her schooling set aside. She began to look forward to Jaime's postcards. She'd long since stopped putting them up, but she kept every one, a stack that grew and grew as the days grew longer and warmer with them. 

And then summer was on the air and she watched the sky from her father's solar – hers now, she supposed. She sat in the sunlight in her father's – her gardens. The days were long, much longer than they had been in Dorne, and Winterfell, and King's Landing. The sunlight was gentler, the grass was far more green. The summer Brienne was twenty-one, she was writing a letter to Jaime, gently inquiring to his well-being as she hadn't had word of him for two weeks, when Goodwin knocked on the door of her study. He was as old as her father would have been, still tall physically but stooped in spirit. Her father's death had hit him especially hard. 

“My lady,” Goodwin said, and he was smiling and she was already rising because she _knew_. “You have a visitor.” 

Then Jaime was there, in her solar, and he was laughing. “My wench. You look like you've seen a ghost,” he said and his voice was so much deeper than she remembered. He was broader and taller, too, and missing a hand, and his hair was as golden as the sun and when he hugged her it felt like summertime. “I told you all those years ago I had survived. Did you think you've been writing to an imposter all these years?”

She was blushing, but she shoved him lightly in the shoulder. “No one could possibly pretend to be you,” she said and she didn't think she meant it as a compliment but his face indicated he took it as one.

His eyes – had they always been that same green as the meadows they spent their summers in? – traveled around the room, over her face. “I'm sorry for your loss, Brienne. You look well, though. You've grown since I saw you last.” 

Brienne was taller than Jaime now, by several inches, and just as wide. “I have,” she acknowledged, suddenly shy. Jaime had grown handsomer, too, the soft marble of his boyish face now chiseled to cutting lines and furrows she wouldn't have expected on someone only twenty-five. She had not grown any more beautiful; often she thought she'd grown less so, as adulthood had taken even the hope of someday being pretty away from her. 

“You've grown,” he said again, and there was something in his tone that stirred an unfamiliar warmth in her body. “No matter. I can still reach your head to place your flower crowns.” 

“I thought you couldn't make them anymore?” she said, and regretted it when the lines around his eyes tightened. 

“I'll make you make them for me.” He took her hands in his one; they barely fit. “It's good to see you, Brienne.” 

“You, too, Jaime. Come, let me show you to your room.” 

The summer went far too quickly. Brienne woke eagerly with the sunrise, went to bed late at night only when one of them could no longer stifle their yawns. They did not spend every moment together, but enough of them that when someone needed Brienne, they would ask Jaime where she was. When someone saw Brienne alone, they would inquire as to Jaime's whereabouts. As the days grew cooler and fall lingered in the evening air, she found herself more and more reluctant to sleep. 

Late one evening, they were sitting on the floor of her room near the fireplace when Jaime said, “Summer is nearly done.” 

“It is,” she agreed. “Will you return to Casterly soon?” 

He shrugged roundly. “It is no better there in fall than the summer. Worse in the winter.” 

“I'm going back to school,” she blurted and Jaime stilled. “In the fall. I missed my last year at college and I don't want to leave it unfinished.”

“I see. I had thought... It makes sense, though. You wouldn't want to hang around here.” 

Brienne looked at him, the way his skin absorbed the firelight. He glowed, though he looked unhappy. “I will come home next summer,” she told him. 

“To stay?” he asked, his voice soft. 

“That depends, I suppose,” she said. Her heart was beating so wildly in her chest she could scarcely breathe. “On where you will be.” 

Jaime looked at her, then, and everything went still. “Here, if you'll have me. I should like to see Tarth in the fall, too, and winter, and spring.” 

“They are not much,” she said. “It's not as beautiful here when the light is gray and the storms roll in.” 

He leaned forward, so close she could feel how he'd absorbed the fire's heat, as well. “It is beautiful to me,” he murmured and he kissed her and he tasted like summer. 

They exchanged letters all through the year; Jaime from Casterly Rock while he closed his affairs there, Brienne from King's Landing where she finished her own. And the winter when Brienne was twenty-two, she discovered that the long nights on Tarth could be as warm as the summer days, as long as Jaime was at her side.


End file.
